Tag: morality

Noise and the Weight of Silence

In a matched pair of screens, Hokusai depicts two groups who are out enjoying an afternoon. I imagine that it is afternoon—it could be morning or early evening. One group of people—larger, closer to us—turns to notice the other group. They are in the distance, smaller, but whatever noise they are making is enough to draw their attention.

Some of the quiet group seem curious about their noisy almost neighbors, and some are clearly annoyed, aggrieved, really. The woman playing the shamisen looks over her shoulder. “What is that ruckus.”

Across the way, two men dance—or fight—with fans. A child rides on his parent’s shoulders. They seem of a lower class than those spread out on a red blanket on the hill above them. They seem unaware of their neighbors or the disturbance they have created. So small, so far away, and yet, so loud. And so fun.

Some of the quiet group seem to look with a kind of longing. “We could be having that fun if we were over there.” The annoyance comes at once from the disturbance and the awareness that a woman in the quiet group (it is a man in Hokusai’s painting that is particularly aggrieved) might want to be with someone else who offers more fun. Pardon me while I engage the metaphorical: beauty wants a little riot.

The museums are, generally, quiet spaces. Most people use the most indoor of indoor voices, except for tour guides and children. In the sculpture garden this morning, one youngster offered a delighted “Wow” when he turned the corner on a Calder. Kids played on the walkway between the East and West buildings of the National Gallery (which is a work of art), amazed by the softness of the walkway and the glistening lights above their heads. A woman gives an impromptu explication of The Feast of the Gods, explaining the cast of characters in Bellini and Titian’s painting.

There are other less quiet conversations. Sometimes about lunch. Sometimes about a musical composition and performance. Phone conversations are always louder than imagined. In a museum? Always. I eavesdrop, and sometimes I ask questions.

Besides all that, the paintings are noisy. Wait, what? No, of course, they aren’t. And then you hear the visceral click-click of Keith Sonnier’s Go Between, but let’s be honest, stone and paint are silent. Except, who cannot hear the snigger behind the kerchief in Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Two Women at a Window? Or the bawdy laughter in Quentin Massys’s The Ill-Matched Lovers? Or who thinks that the animals gathered for Circe’s lesson in Circe and her Lovers in a Landscape attend her in silence? Or that she is silent? Or the squeezebox playing angel in Mary, Queen of Heaven? Even the idyllic scenes contain the rush of wind over a field.

from Mary, Queen of Heaven

Still lives and portraits test this, but once again, if you cannot hear the voice of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, it’s your fault and not Titian’s.

Then there is abstract art, which seems to want to put a cork in art’s ample mouth. It’s hard to hear Rothko or Louis or Andre; there may be a note or a chord playing in your mind’s ear yet, these pieces wrestle elsewhere. They are either loud or static-filled or, like Oldenburg’s Clarinet Bridge, just out and out messing with you.

Claes Oldenburg, Clarinet Bridge

I spend my Sundays surrounded by noise—the art and the people—and it rejuvenates me. I reflect on a time in my life when I was surrounded by people who preferred silence during their slice of Sunday. I wish I did not think about this. I do not enjoy thinking about people who complained about the noises children made in church or griped how a fellow congregant beat a tambourine during hymns. While I write this, a child shrieks in a Smithsonian American Art Museum gallery in a full gale. Life happens.

Of course there is a value to spending time in the field or forest, the mountain or ocean, but none of these are silent at all. There is a generous cacophony in nature. But silence has come to dominate spirituality. People gather and decide to subdue noise for ostensibly spiritual reasons. I wonder at how fragile one’s spiritual life must be to suffer from human noise. I watched Barak Obama’s Eulogy for Reverend Pinckney with my Speech students, and it was a noisy event. People chipped in with “yes,” “that’s right,” and dozen other verbal nods; they would have earned hard stares at my church.

The valorization of silence imposes a purity narrative on the spiritual. Like all purity narratives, this only serves to control an otherwise uncontrollable experience. And it places the blame for distraction someplace else—the same way that some faiths require the covering of women to prevent men from being distracted. We all are so easily distracted.

Perhaps we wrestle with distraction because is a piece of our evolutionary puzzle: we had to be easily distracted to avoid danger. Our senses are always on alert. But maybe the problem isn’t so much about distraction as focus. For instance, when I attended Quaker Meeting, we all sat silently. But we listened—not for our thoughts or ideas, but for the spirit. Silence was a way of severing us from not just the world but from ourselves, so that we could listen—attend—more closely.

I’m not sure that we are listening the right way anymore. We try to “hear ourselves think,” and then replicate that strain of thought everywhere around us. We listen to confirm our biases, and it is almost impossible to do anything else. Our brains strive for homeostasis—not just of temperature, but attitude. The more we listen to the “still strong voice,” the less we hear the clarinet blast—or the tone of the angelic pipe organ squeezebox—that calls us to what we, fortunately,  do not know.

What I Watched About Evil: Out of the Past

Out of the Past (1947)

Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Starring
Robert Mitchum as Jeff Bailey (Markham)
Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat
Kirk Douglas as Whit Sterling
Virginia Huston as Ann Miller

“Think we ought to go home?

“Do you want to?”

“No.”

Out of the Past begins with a montage of shots of the Sierras. It looks like a series of Anselm Adams’ photographs: stark snow-peaked mountains and high skies cast in rich, sharp grays. The music is sweeping; it befits the landscape. The camera pans down to a small town, Bridgeport, in the shadow of the mountains, and follows a black car as it drives in among the white buildings. The good world, the one we wish for, may be severe in its beauty, but it is beautiful—and natural. Evil, when it comes, comes in human form, wearing a black coat and black gloves.

None of this is surprising or unexpected. It’s almost too easy and too obvious. Out of the Past is a movie that continually works between the obvious and the hidden. The main character, Jeff Bailey, is hiding in Bridgeport, a sleepy little California town with a diner owner who knows everyone’s business. Jeff is the wild card, which draws the attention of the town’s beautiful Ann Miller. She is straight out of a fairy tale. We first meet her fishing in secret with Jeff, he declares, “You see that cove over there? Well, I’d like to build a house right there, marry you, live in it, and never go anywhere else.” She answers, “I wish you would.” Ann comes from a world where wishes come true. Jeff does not.

Jeff Bailey is a marked man—his actual name is “Markham,” and we learn the details of his past promptly as the story progresses. The black-gloved driver has come with a summons for Jeff from a gangster named Whit Sterling. The gangster and Jeff share a past: Whit hired Jeff to find a woman, Kathie Moffat, who stole forty thousand dollars and his heart (although the gangster never admits this); Jeff found the woman and fell in love with her. In simplest terms, Whit is evil.

In simpler terms than that, so is Kathie. Essays about film noir identify Kathie Moffat as the femme fatale par excellence. She is bad. After hearing her story, Ann states, “She can’t be all bad. No one is.” Jeff responds, “Well, she comes the closest.” Before the story of the movie begins, Kathie shot Whit—three times with his own gun. She shoots and kills Jeff’s partner (after Jeff pummels him in a fistfight). She finishes off Whit. And finally, she shoots Jeff. She is bad; she is a killer. But so are most of the male characters in the film—even the “innocent” deaf-mute boy who works for Jeff causes the death of Whit’s black-coated muscleman. Kathie acts out of self-interest, and unlike Jeff, who naively believes that his roughed-up partner will not cause further trouble, Kathie understands what men will do. Jeff barely understands himself.

Jeff is repeatedly called “smart” in this film. It reminds me of how often Iago is called “honest” in Othello. Mitchum plays Jeff with languid rakish charm, and it’s an act so good that it convinces nearly everyone, even himself. Jeff is tough enough to claim, “I’m afraid of half the things I ever did,” but toughness and charm simply ease his way into disaster. His actions lead to the deaths of six characters, including his own. He kills none of them. Joe Stefanos, Whit’s muscle, kills a man to frame Jeff. “The Kid”—who works for Jeff—hooks Joe with a well-placed cast and pulls him from a precipice and to his death. Kathie kills three. And the police kill Kathie. But all six deaths begin with Jeff’s admission, “I saw her—coming out of the sun. And I knew why Whit didn’t care about that 40 grand.” “I saw her.”

Some critics will let Jeff off the hook—an appropriate metaphor in this film because we are introduced to Ann and Jeff while they are fishing—and claim that the film frames Kathie. After all, Jeff acts nobly at the end of the movie, when the Kid tells Ann, in unspoken accordance with Jeff, that Jeff was leaving with Kathie. This clears the way for Ann to return to her old reliable beau. And Kathie did kill three men.

Still, Jeff’s naïveté—the kind of naïveté fostered by an over-sentimental macho ethos—never takes into account the consequences of his actions. He’s halfway smart and gets the lion’s share of great lines, but he doesn’t actually know what he’s saying. The lines just sound good. When he chides Whit, “I sell gasoline, I make a small profit. We call it earning a living. You may have heard of it somewhere,” he doesn’t really believe it, no matter what he tells Ann or anyone else.

“You’re no good, and neither am I,” Kathie insists to Jeff. We may have been charmed by Jeff. She may have found him charming, she may even love him, but most of all, she knows him and knows that the good act that he puts on is his weakness. He is evil—as bad as her, worse because he can neither admit it nor make it work to his advantage. It’s a crushing realization.

The realization that the hero—even the louche antihero played so well by Mitchum—is, in fact, the villain, is not easy to accept. We like the cool character, the slow-eyed machismo wins us over, even while he threatens the fairy tale princess at the heart of the story. Maybe we like him for the same reason that we like the stark gray landscape: the Sierras are neither moral nor immoral. The landscape is beyond good and evil. If the mountain stream can be sublime even though it may be dangerous, then why can’t a person be beautiful even if she—or he—is villainous?

Iago claims that “When devils will the blackest sins put on,/ They do suggest at first with heavenly shows” (2.3.371-2), he points out how we may be fooled by evil. There’s something else though, a willingness to set aside our judgment when the “Divinity of Hell” wanders into our midst. We want to understand, to analyze, and to rationalize, thus casting evil into a knowable and, therefore, acceptable quality. We value our ability to sympathize, no matter what. Do we sympathize with Whit? Or his blunt right hand, Joe Stefanos? Or even the femme fatale, Kathie? I suspect that we do not. But Jeff elicits sympathy. Because he is cool, and maybe, because we want a little of that coolness to rub off on us. No matter the cost.

It’s what we wish for.

“Think we ought to go home?” Ann asks Jeff when we meet them. He answers with a question, “Do you want to?” She says, “No.” Home, this country founded on a beautiful idea that there is no evil—or if there is, it is outside whatever we define as home: the four walls, the property lined with a stone wall, the land we call our own. We wish for home and cousin up to the idea that evil exists outside, that it is a black-gloved interloper, that it doesn’t know how to fish, that it doesn’t hire the innocent deaf-mute boy to pump gas and repair tires. And that if evil does exist at home, it comes in the form of nosiness, petty jealousies and provincial attitudes. It doesn’t look or sound like Jeff Bailey.

Resentment

There is always regret when one has not done not just what one has wanted to do, but has dreamed of all of their lives. “If only I had started sooner,” regret whispers. “If only I had not taken that job, moved to that city, loved that person.” Regret is a whispered siren’s song, and it can lead one toward a sadness that is disastrous to the work.

Regret has a companion emotion, and once one figures out exactly what one needs to do, this other emotion can assert itself in awful ways. This emotion is resentment. Anything—everything—that does not help us attain our vision—our purpose—can cause us to feel resentment. For instance: a job that takes our time—our necessary and limited time—even if that job is fulfilling and valuable. Even if that job pays the bills. Our family can cause feelings of resentment. This is a deep dark secret: the people we love can be the people who awaken resentment in us. Because they ask—as they are entitled—for our most precious resources: our imagination, our patience, our time; our essential necessary energy to do the work at hand. And this is terrible. No one wants to resent for their family or loved ones. And yet, we do.

Anything—everything—that takes away from the energy needed to do the creative work that gives our lives meaning cause resentment. One must learn to carve out sufficient time to be fully engaged and to spend the energy at the work required to fulfill one’s purpose. This is true in any circumstance—with or without family, with or without loved ones, and with or without other work. Once one sees what can be done, one must change one’s life to fulfill one’s purpose.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

However, resentment is not located in those other places. Neither my child, nor my job, nor anyone else in my life is the actual wellspring of resentment. It comes from me. Of course there are stupid little human annoyances—the woman who sliced into the left lane ahead of me on I-95 today, then just as abruptly, sliced back through traffic across two lanes to make a sudden right exit. The anger caused by such behaviors only lingers for so long. Resentment comes from an inward driven anger that sharpens regret and turns it back out to the world. The clearest targets are those who are nearest us.

Yes, there may be times when those close to us do ask us to stop our most purposeful work for reasons that are worthy of resentment. They may question your sense of self, and cast aspersions on your work and aspirations. Sometimes people cannot escape the deep-seated injuries and resulting resentments that their injuries caused, and they struggle, not with themselves, but with you. Just as you may struggle with resentment. Just as I have struggled. And one must escape that false judgment, and not validate it in any way. For the most part, we are the main manufacturers of our own grief. We stop ourselves. We foist anger on ourselves and take handfuls of earth and shower ourselves in dirt. We manifest an anger that eats us from within.

I am not suggesting that one should not be angry. Anger can be a source of energy, a goad to action when complacency or sadness or depression has settled too deeply on the creative mind. I let that anger into my work—allowing characters to taste it and spit it where it needs to land. So too with me, I learn, daily, the difference between anger caused by genuine external sources and that which has simply emanated from some ancient sun within me.

When I feel resentment, I check my sources first, and realize that, more likely than not, that I am not doing what I need to do. I am not tending my work and my purpose as I should. I have taken—for reasons at once honorable and misguided—someone else’s charge and anger as my own. I put it down, gently, if I can, and get back to work. The way forward—to fulfillment, to joy—is here.

Risking it all

It is difficult to explain the existential risk that the writer—at least this writer—undertakes when working. It is tantamount to this:

One time we (my father, two crewmates, and I) sailed out of the Chesapeake Bay and onto the ocean in a gale. A gale is wind at 40 knots. There was already 6-8 foot chop in the bay. One of us (a first-time sailor) slipped into his bunk clutching his life jacket, stricken with an indomitable case of seasickness. We sailed short-handed into stupid weather and bigger seas.

For the next four days, 30-50 knot winds harassed us, and the sea that was more like a protracted set of sand dunes, the water whipped by the wind into twelve-foot peaks that barely seemed to move. They were moving though, faster than we were in our 36-foot sailboat. The ship sailed up and down these wet rolling hills, making ragged progress toward our goal: Bermuda.

Sensible men would have waited, but for all my father’s strengths (long-range planning, and in-the-moment decisiveness among them), he had a stubbornness that did not waver. Once he had a plan, he stuck to it. Later in life, this supported him as he battled g on with Parkinson’s Disease. He suffered with the adaptations the illness forced on him, but refused to be stopped. In the end this led to his death. On this trip, his drive took us into conditions that would test us.

I should also note that when I point to a crewmate who became seasick, I do not cast aspersions. I get seasick, and had each time I had sailed on the ocean before this. It always struck me when I took my first late watch, when the horizon was shrouded in black, and my eyes and inner ear could not properly make sense of the several directions that my body was moving. It is an ugly sickness, driving the guts empty in rebellion until there is nothing left but bile. I never missed my turns at the helm because of it. The nausea would strike, and I would turn my head, and do what I needed. I did not eat or drink while it was on me, and it passed, for me it did, and after 36 hours.

On this trip, in this ocean, I was entirely spared. All my other crewmates, even my father, were struck. In retrospect perhaps the swell of the sea was so distinct and regular, that the three-way (pitch, yaw, and roll) motion did not take grip of me. Or perhaps the danger created a necessary clarity. As with all retrospect, I cannot be sure.

After four days, we finally passed into the fringe of whatever had driven the gale. In a matter of hours, the wind created new swell patterns. Around midnight, the sea that had been a reasonable set of rolling hills, turned, and became more like waves breaking over an invisible reef or sand bar. 18-24 foot waves rose and broke, all headed in one direction. They are called following seas, which means the breakers were rising behind us, and rolling toward us. They were moving faster than we were and lifted our boat to each peak, at which point our boat would slide down the front of the breaker like a sailboard.

That sounds easy enough, but as the boat fell down the surface of each wave, it carved a path driven by gravity and the force of the wave it was riding. Its path down the wave became, temporarily and repeatedly, unmanageable. Pushed by wind, pushed by water, pulled by gravity, the rudder merely suggested a direction. And yet, when at the helm, every suggestion made a difference. Caught at the top of a breaker, the boat could easily go sideways and roll over. Sliding down the side of the breakers, it could turn too sharply and roll over.

A sailboat is not a surfboard.

My father and I took the helm when the sea turned. We held it in half-hour turns, and it was exhausting work that required dense and specific attention. And, we were exhausted after the previous days of sail. Usually, in harsh conditions, one man took the wheel, and the other took refuge propped against the cabin in the leeward side of the cockpit, using the cabin as a wall against the constant water that broke over the windward gunwale. In this case, as we planed down the sides of the swells, the leeward gunwale cut into the water, and the water rushed into the cockpit. This added a new threat. The boat could be capsized, swamped with water if the helmsmen was not attentive. And, because no attention was enough, at the very least, we were soaked, the water pooling in our yellow foul weather gear, which was not designed for repeated submersion.

At 4 in the morning my father looked at me and said, “I can’t do it anymore. I’m going to send another crew member up, but you cannot let him take the helm until the sea settles down. You have to sail until then. The boat is yours.”

I brought a waterproof Walkman on these trips. While I took the helm that night, I listened to an array of the loudest songs I had: Dinosaur Jr’s “I Know You’re Out There,” Medicine’s “One More,” and Sonic Youth’s “Sugar Kane.” Nothing was loud enough. Nothing matched the ocean or my attention. Nothing matched my awareness of what might happen, or when my father relented, what had happened.

I sailed. Every time I turned the wheel, I felt like I was making a decision that could imperil the lives of all of us. We would go down fast, without time to throw the life raft overboard. It would happen in an instant. We were at sea—tempest-tossed as Shakespeare wrote. The end would come quickly. Each time I turned the wheel, each millimeter I moved it to port or starboard, I felt as if I was making a decision for speed and forward motion. It felt, again, as the bard wrote, giddy. Not happy, and not drunk—although I felt as drunk as I could be—drunk with sailing, with water, and with wind—but transported out of my mind, beyond all thought, and into every thought possible. I sailed as I never had before, as I would always want to sail afterward.

Friends ask me if I have been sailing in the years since my father’s death. I have not. But even before he died, I knew that I would not—not because of fear or seasickness (an anti-vertigo drug helped allay that)—but because I had done something then that I would never replicate. Not on the ocean. I have sought it ever since.

I do not know what has ever led me back to safety. I know that what calls me is not simply mastery (I have a Ph.D. in English, I have some level of mastery there), but the exhilaration of being over the edge of control and into the realm of the impossible. To be the captain, which I became that night. Sometimes, too often, I have exercised the caution I faulted my father for lacking. I have stayed controlled, almost too calm. In some measure, this is because I feel a lack of control and a lack of mastery around me. Even the experts profess a quietness or steadfastness, when sometimes what is needed is to go out of one’s mind. To forgo safety. To risk. But also to carry the responsibility for the lives on board. We are, truly, in this together, and must all go out of our minds, together.

I have over-prepared, or tried to know, to tame the ideas in my head, worried that they were unintelligible, or that they were somehow too strange. I feel myself now, at the top of the breaking wave again. And look down into the night sea. This way. Now. Down. For life.

Perpetrators and Bystanders

In his TED Talk, “Violence Against Women—It’s a Men’s Issue,” Jackson Katz talks about the how there has been an awful lot of silence” from men surrounding the issue of sexual abuse. He quotes Dr. Martin Luther King, who pointed out that “in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Katz proposes that when bystanders—those who are neither perpetrators nor victims of male violence—act against violence, not by simply intervening at the point of the violent action, but by calling out misogyny as it occurs in daily interactions, then the bystanders will help curb the violence that men commit against women.

I am thinking about this today because of the events that have transpired at my alma mater, the progressive bastion, Swarthmore College. At my old school, documents surfaced (and were published in the student newspapers) that called into question the nature of that culture. Young men wrote of a “rape attic” in one of the fraternities, and bragged about efforts to abuse women. Fortunately, when the documents came to light, action was swift. Unfortunately, as it must seem, knowledge of what had gone on must have existed in the community well before the documents were published in the student newspapers.

I know several women who men have sexually assaulted. Too many. I have seen how the assaults have shaped their lives. And strangely, I know no men who have sexually assaulted women. And that cannot be true. I know this. Because we must know that it isn’t just one man, or a few men committing these acts of violence—one or a handful of perpetrators and many victims. I would surmise that there are nearly as many perpetrators as there are victims.

The easy thing is to see men who commit violence as somehow uneducated, or unenlightened. The chants of “No means yes! Yes means anal!” at Yale, or the actions revealed in the documents at Swarthmore show that violence permeates all corners—high and low. You can be brilliant and assault women. I would hazard that one could be called or thought of as a “good man” by many, and assault women.

A friend posits that it is testosterone—she calls it “the most dangerous thing in the world”—that is at the root of male violence. And perhaps, but that seems like a broad stroke. There is a positive power in masculinity. However, a masculinity that seeks to control, denigrate, degrade, and rape, is foreign to me. These are not values that resonate or connect with anything eternal. My friends who point to the evolutionary roots of male violence—as if distant biology superseded any moral imperative—also seem to be making an excuse.

And yet, “we know better” is belied by the behavior of too many men in too many places. It is time to look in the mirror, as men, and to hold each other accountable. Because, if we all know a victim of sexual violence, we also know a perpetrator.

The Wrong Side of the Bed

Some days it feels like there is no good side of the bed. I wander into the day with storm clouds surrounding me, and then the day just adds more; I go from grey to absolute darkness. Everything that people say, even people that I love and respect, just strikes me as wrong. Nothing is where I have put it (I work in spaces that I share, so this is—growl—fairly typical). It is too humid. Help that is offered is the wrong help, or worse, unhelpful. My face works itself into a deeply lined scowl. People charitably comment that I look tired. I know the code. I look angry.

In general, I am a happy man. I can find my way to a good feeling by hook and by crook. I take joy from a cup of coffee, and from the sound of my daughter’s voice. I rarely find myself in the place the Violent Femmes describe in “Add It Up”; in fact, just singing along (“Why can’t I get just one fuck…”) makes me laugh. The universe is like a perpetual gift-giving machine designed by the best toymaker ever.

Except. Except when the black clouds of contrariness gather around my head. And then storm. (It’s so bad that I cannot even manage complete sentences to describe the feeling). The first flash of anger brings attendant feelings of self-loathing and despair; I have failed again to keep the thunder at bay. This of course leads to more anger—at myself, and at whatever the temporary cause of it may be. Call worship service boring? Rage. Complain that the smell of cookies in the oven smells like something burning? Rage. The Juniors and Seniors decide to ditch detention on a day I skip an important meeting to sit for two hours with their recalcitrant selves. Rage. I can hear my mother, “I’ll wring your neck.” Thanks mom. Rage.

Anger is my forbidden emotion, and because in the atlas of my brain I have marked it taboo (here there be dragons), I am less familiar with the terrain than I should be. Okay, that’s a lie. I am terrifyingly familiar with anger. I walked over that ground for years as a child and adolescent. The flags of my furies unfurled when something or someone contradicted or existentially threatened the foundations of my moral universe. When I was a boy, those foundations were fairly straightforward and limited, and resulted in squalls of “That’s not fair,” which could pertain to the most trivial (“He has more soda than I do!”), to the substantial (“How can you throw him out of school weeks before graduation?”). The dictates of fairness required an even hand be dealt to all, and later incorporated a sense of esprit de corps (were all in this together). I clove to these rules tightly and took the breaches seriously.

And what isn’t fair to a first born son? We, who stand at the vanguard of the moral universe, who plunge into the morasses that our parents design into swampy labyrinths, who seek strength and consistency and meet frailty and disorganization—or worse hypocrisy. I learned early enough not to get angry when I encounter something that doesn’t simply challenge me (lesson from sailing #37: learn to confront challenges: sea-sickness, rain, rash decisions, doldrums, incapable crew, broken ribs; with aplomb. Because another challenge is coming in 5, 4, 3, 2…), or disagree with me. In fact, I run toward, perhaps too giddily, challenge and disagreement. It wasn’t always so, but learning to be gleefully devastated from time to time helped me become a good student, and (so I hope) a better man.

As I aged, I learned to grasp the essentially contradictory nature of life. I embraced Whitman’s charge: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” On the flip side, I expected others to embrace it as well. I attribute my general buoyancy to the multitudinous sea of possibility in which I swim, but I recognize that others must swim in narrower straits. Must you? Really? On stormy days, I do too. I feel as if I am repudiating myself, reneging on the promises I have made to myself and to the universe, failing at my calling and failing at my life’s sole purpose. I want to run away, and live cabin-bound on the rolling ocean, in the thickest forest, on the side of a stark and forbidding mountain.

On rare occasions, I draw on this narrower, “fatal vision” as Macbeth calls it. When I play poker, for instance, I find it easier to put on the fierce blinders of aggression. Sometimes when I write, I close the larger windows to focus on just this pane or that pane of vision. When I teach, I rein in my big confusing mind so that my students can see what it is like to walk on one path in one direction with singular purpose and clarity; that is the lesson they must learn now. After these experiences, I feel drained, in part because I have intentionally disconnected, and the angry hand is the one that flips that switch.

So, when the grey days come unbidden, from a bad night’s sleep, or illness, or some twist of half remembered dream or memory (do I have to wake up with THAT strange bedfellow today?), I feel less myself, at odds with the world, looking, like Ishmael, for hats to knock off, and eyeing ships bound for sea with untoward desire. But, the day passes. I remain a free man. In the morning to come, every side of the bed glistens with possibility again, and I am once again myself.